iso-8859-1 snippets

This is an example of how to use the FeedTools gem to parse a feed. FeedTools supports atom, rss, and so on...

The only negative thing about FeedTools is that the project is abandoned, the author said this in a comment from March 2008:
“I’ve effectively abandoned it, so I’m really not going to go taking on huge code reorganization efforts.”

Feed updater

There's also a feed updater tool that can fetch feeds in the background, but I haven't had time to look at it yet.

sudo gem install feedupdater

Character set/encoding bug

As always, there are bugs that you need to be aware of, Feedtools is no different. There's an encoding bug, FeedTools encodes everything to ISO-8859-1, instead UTF-8 which should be the default encoding.

Time estimation

By default FeedTools will try to estimate when a feed item was published, if it's not available from the feed. This annoys me and will create weird publish dates, so usually it's a good idea to disable it with the timestamp_estimation_enabled option: